Federation of Egyptian Industries calls to establish SMEs bank: official

Jul. 14, 2014 11:30

Central Bank of Egypt -YOUM7 (Archive)

By AHMED ABU SHADY

CAIRO: The head of the Strategic Committee for Small and Mid-Cap Enterprises (SMEs) at the Federation of Egyptian Industries (FEI) Bahgat Al-Dahesh called to establish an industrial bank to fund SMEs, Mubasher reported.

“Although SMEs represent 90 percent of total companies and provide most of Egypt’s job opportunities, Egypt does not have a specialized bank to fund the projects,” Dahesh said. “The new bank system will increase investment in this sector, solve finance problems, and increase SMEs’ participation within the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).”

Besides setting up the bank, the government should adopt new strategies to solve the sector’s problems, remove investment obstacles, open new horizons for investments, and provide production factors to facilitate investment and flourish the economy, he added.

Besides setting up SMEs bank, the government should work on providing non-financial services such as “marketing feasibility study training courses and investment measures,” head of Federation of Economic Development Associations Fouad Thabet told The Cairo Post in a phone interview Sunday.

The lack of non-governmental services is considered a major obstacle before achieving growth in the SMEs sector, Thabet said.

Many industries were negatively impacted in the past three years due to political unrest and public turmoil in Egypt, member of Industrial Development and Workers Bank of Egypt’s board Hamdy Azzam announced Sunday. SMEs helped create a balance in the economy through that phase, Amwal Al-Ghad reported Sunday.

The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) planned to work in developing a database for SMEs clients, “who amount to 36,000 individuals,” to develop the sector and present more subsidized loans, Azzam added.